UCI team’s preemptive COVID vaccine candidate has promising results

UC Irvine professor of immunology Lbachir BenMohamed — who also is the director of the Laboratory of Cellular and Molecular Immunology at the university’s Gavin Herbert Eye Institute — and his colleagues have been developing a preemptive vaccine for all coronaviruses with a multimillion-dollar grant from the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Because coronaviruses can mutate, experts at UCI have been working to develop a vaccine that will attack the spike protein and additional proteins in SARS-CoV-2.